We did a thing!

I've talked some about fitness on here but it would appear I haven't written anything about Couch 2 5K. Normally its written as Couch25K or C25K for short. Its a program to help non-runners to learn to run. I've started the program many times and last year finally finished it. Unfortunately life got in the way as it does.

This year I restarted with renewed vigor because some friends invited us to participate in a Spartan Race with them. Spartan is just one of a stack of obstacle course runs. Specifically in Spartan you run a 5k with 22 obstacles. Heck to get to the start line you need to cross a 4 foot wall.

The obstacles include monkey bars, (nope, no chance) rings, (again, no chance) a spear throw, (harder than it seemed like it should be, I didn't even see anybody complete it successfully) and a bunch of wall climbs.

Its hard to say what my favorite obstacle was, I liked a couple of them, like the bag lift where you drag a weighted bag into the air with a rope that goes up over a pulley.

I also quite liked the A-frames pictured here. The netting in the distance in the picture is the outgoing run. By that point you've completed (or taken penalties) on a couple obstacles and are just finding your rhythm. The netting in the foreground is the very last thing before you leap over fire to finish.

Least favorite was the Atlas stone. The stone is really a concrete sphereoid (not really a sphere) about 75 pounds. I could pick it up but I couldn't then stand up. My friends had to help pick it up. Carrying it was no real issue but dang it was demoralizing not being able to pick it up.

Lesson learned, I need a lot more upper body strength and especially grip strength.

The joke is that you spend $100+ to punish yourself and get a medal and a t-shirt.

Another lesson I learned is that I didn't need the hydration pack. It was just one more thing to drag around. We were only out for 2 hours and there was water available. I'm not sure I really even needed a snack although I was starving and thirsty when we finished.

10 years ago I would never have considered such a thing but now we're already planning for next year. I'll try to update on training progress, I've got some ideas. We finished in 2:06, the goal for next year is to get under 2 hours. If I can get my mile run under 10 minutes we'll be pretty much there...